Blockchain Papers

Jaan Valsiner

No abstract is available for this record.

Gregg G. Van Ryzin

Peter John’s latest book, How Far to Nudge?: Assessing Behavioural Public Policy, is part intellectual history, part a tale of policy diffusion, and part a personal reflection on the behavioral science revolution in public policy and administration by someone who himself was one of its key rebels. John, who is a professor of political science and public policy in the United Kingdom, was an early protagonist and practitioner of behavioral and experimental approaches to public administration. In a sense, this book completes a trilogy of volumes by him on the topic: the first, Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think: Experimenting with Ways to Change Civic Behavior (John et al. 2011), documents cases in which John and his collaborators used behavioral insights (such as the tendency to comply with social norms) to test nudge strategies aimed at influencing citizens to recycle, volunteer, vote, and give to charity; in the second, Field Experiments in Political Science and Public Policy (John 2017), John provides guidance on the design and implementation of randomized controlled trials of behavioral interventions involving government programs and services. In How Far to Nudge?, John steps back to reflect more broadly on the origins, practices, limitations, ethics, and political implications of behavioral public policy. As he writes in the introduction: “Given the success of nudge, now is the time to broaden it out and to link it more closely to democratic practice” (p. 14). He begins by making the case that many important social, health, and economic challenges facing government have their roots in both individual and collective human behaviors. Diseases are often determined by health behaviors, for example, although John is quick to point out the structural influences (such as poverty and access to health care) that play a key role in addition to human behavior. Still, he makes a compelling argument for the important role of behavior change in many areas of public policy and administration. Next, he tells the fascinating story of the behavioral revolution in the social sciences. For those already acquainted with popular books such as Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman and Egan 2011), Richard Thaler’s Misbehaving (Thaler and Ganser 2015), and Michael Lewis’ The Undoing Project (Lewis 2016), this story will be somewhat familiar. But John tells it from his own perspective as a political scientist and articulates the connections to public policy and administration. Amusingly, he enjoys cluing his reader in on some of the hype and self-promotion that accounts, at least in part, for the popularity of behavioral economics in the halls of government and in the public imagination. But he pays due respect as well to the important advances and insights of the likes of Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Thaler, Cass Suntein, Daniel Ariely, and others whose work over the years formed the intellectual foundations for behavioral public policy. The middle chapters of the book reflect on the practices and limitations of behavioral policy in government, a narrative informed to a large extent by John’s own extensive work in the United Kingdom and other countries applying nudge strategies to government. He discusses how nudge units were established in government agencies in the United Kingdom (especially the Behavioral Insights Team) and elsewhere and, importantly, how their continuation often depends on the contingencies of political leadership and changing priorities. Usefully, John specifies some of the key (and often unmentioned) limitations of behavioral insights in government, such as the limited range of application (mostly letters, forms, and messages), small and often temporary effects, limited generalizability, and the worry that a focus on nudge diverts the government’s attention from pursuing more substantive (and expensive) solutions to pressing social and policy problems. John also devotes a chapter to the ethics of nudging, which has been defined largely as a form of libertarian paternalism because it entails both choice and direction (nudge). John fully recognizes the dangers inherent in the creation of a “psychological state” but remains optimistic about the potential of nudging, given the generally limited and transparent nature of the nudge initiatives to date and the potential to incorporate nudge tactics into reflective, self-governance practices. Usefully, John also reminds us that public policy-making, in general, involves difficult ethical questions and that nudge is often a less intrusive instrument than laws, regulations, and other conventional instruments of government control over people’s behavior. In the last chapters, as foreshowed throughout the book, John make an original argument: nudges work well enough, but they must be made more open, democratic, and deliberative to truly sustain long-term behavior change and thus improve government and society. “Nudge plus (think)” is what he advocates. This approach envisions a behavioral public policy that leverages both System 1 (fast, intuitive) and System 2 (slow, deliberate) thinking, following Kahneman’s well-known formulation, in the service of better outcomes for individuals and society (Kahneman and Egan 2011). Thus, John highlights ways in which nudge initiatives can incorporate citizen participation and can be made more transparent and explained more fully to citizens. In addition, he makes the point that nudge should not be just a tool of technocrats but should be decentralized to agencies, local governments, and civil society organizations to incorporate behavioral insights into their own autonomous activities. John explains: “The idea is that a combination of nudging and thinking can help the creation of an automated and self-regulating system whereby people get to their goals and where there is a synergy between social and individual aims” (p. 133). But, of course, this formulation is complicated by the implications of the very behavioral revolution John writes about. If we believe what modern psychology has to say about the large role in human behavior played by automatic thought processes (thinking fast), emotions (gut feelings), and our limited capacity for rational problem solving (bounded rationality), then conscious deliberation only gets us so far. The conscious mind is the tip of an iceberg, we have come to discover, consisting of a murky mass of evolutionary or deeply learned associations, construals, heuristics, and biases. But what John argues in his book, it seems to me, is that this conscious tip of the iceberg can nevertheless reflect on how it deals with and attempts to influence the unconscious mass of forces active below the surface. Just like a patient in psychotherapy learns to recognize and deal with the deeply buried emotions that intrude on his life, even if he cannot alter them, so too a democratic society can learn to recognize its cognitive biases and behavioral bugs and find ways, through democratic deliberation, to deal with them and thus live a better collective life. In sum, Peter John’s How Far to Nudge? provides a thoughtful, insightful and original take on the behavioral science revolution in public policy and administration. The book serves as a helpful resource for those looking for an overview of the current status of nudge in government, and it would provide a useful text for graduate courses that include a focus on behavioral public policy and administration. And yet the book is thought-provoking for those already familiar with the topic as well because, having worked extensively at applying nudge tactics in government and having read widely in the behavioral sciences, John is able to provide a uniquely informed perspective on the practices, limitations, ethics, and political implications of the behavioral turn in public policy and public administration as this approach assumes an increasingly prominent role in governments around the world.